LIVERPOOL ECHO

Liverpool Echo began as a complaint. Two blokes sitting round backstage at a gig one night in the early seventies bemoaning the fact that nobody wrote songs like they used to.

So they had a drink and asked why not.

As there didn..t seem to be any good reason why not, they had another drink and talked about writing some songs that sounded like the sort of songs Lennon and McCartney should still have been writing, were there any fairness in the world..

However, as they say, In Vino Veritas so what started out as inebriated rantings, soon became a more structured idea and a colleague, who had some studio time available, suggested that, instead of just talking a good song, they should actually start recording some.

After all, the people who were born in '45 would be '33 in '78 and they didn't want this to happen without a fight.

At first they just doodled around, enjoying themselves, pretending to be Beatles, but rapidly began to realise that, actually, there were still a lot of songs just waiting to be written. Gradually, like minded people from well known, but similarly disaffected, bands began to drift in and pretty soon there was an actual band.

They set up three amps and a drum kit and some mikes and started to think in black and white, wreathed in heavy shadows and cigarette smoke, and started to play. No SSL desks, no computer mixes, no East West North or Southlakes, definitely no samples..not even a Moog.... just eight track tape and an engineer who knew what they were on about. They were Liverpool Echo.

The more they played, the more they wrote. When the eponymous album, with the blessing of the newspaper, was finished and mixed to their satisfaction, they took it and launched it out into the unsuspecting world,

Which, of course, was busy doing something else and wasn't listening....so they shook hands and said goodbye and the vinyl album was put away next to Middle Of The Road, The New Seekers and Ernie, The Fastest Milkman In The West....

Liverpool Echo grew up, got married, bought Kenwood Chefs and had kids and pretty soon they found their wives nagging them to move all that old crap from the bottom of the wardrobe so they could have somewhere to put their shoes.

The old album was despatched to the boot sale where it caught the eye of an aficionado who paid almost a quid and took it with him back to his home in Utah or Montana or somewhere that still had things on which you could play a vinyl album.

And on the eighth day someone created the Internet and Liverpool Echo were pestered day and night with e mails asking them about things they had forgotten..like the words..and the chords. Sometimes they would stay up late into the evening, burning the midnight oil, sometimes working right through until ten fifteen at night, putting on their glasses and trying to remember the drummer's name.

But Liverpool Echo's kids showed them how to work the Interweb thingy and soon exciting things were happening, with a release on a tiny little record that you didn't have to have a stylus to play.....